Wines and Meads, from "both sides of the pond" plus a few bits of other fermented food/drink

Sunday, February 24, 2008

"Fruit Meads" - confusion!

Well OK, I'm no rocket scientist, but as I've never found any commercially made metheglin, melomel, cyser, etc etc (all alternative "proper" names for fruit/spice flavoured meads), I've got not benchmark to work from.

I've tried a number of different recipes and so far haven't been impressed with any of them. Yes there's usually a fruit/spice like taste in the background and a honey like taste, but which is supposed to be the predominant flavour ?

For example, just how "strawberry" is a strawberry melomel supposed to be ? But then again, even with normal "country" (fruit etc) wines, just how strawberry is a normal strawberry wine supposed to taste ?

Yes I have tasted a few commercial country/fruit wines - Gales seem to still make them, though I haven't tried any of theirs for a number of years (maybe worth a trip to the Portsmouth area to visit the shop), but so far, I haven't been satisfied with the flavours of the ones I've attempted.

So I suppose it's down to how I make them i.e. the actual recipe. I'm not a fan of these recipes that have a very vague taste of the original main flavouring ingredient, I like my country wines like alcoholic versions of an original cordial.

Is it a case of increasing the amount base fruit ? or upping the sugar level of the recipe ? or maybe both ? or even upping the amount of fruit and then when it's finished fermenting increasing the sweetness with sugar, honey or some other sweetening agent ?

Hell I just don't know !

For a hobby that's supposed to be easy, it's easy to be as confused as hell about how to achieve a specific result ! All the relevant information is just so fragmented. What's right, what's believable, and what's relevant to creating a specific taste. Or how to modify a wine that tastes all right but has an incorrect "mouth feel" i.e. it's lacking in body/viscosity or the like.

There must be a way of doing this, but right now, I'm buggered if I can work out what it is!